Watch The Field For Free

You won't be disappointed!

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Good movie but grossly overrated

Amazing worth wacthing. So good. Biased but well made with many good points.

In 1959 an unsolved murder case in Kerry took an unusual twist. The previous November a bachelor farmer named Maurice Moore had been found strangled to death. It says a lot about the distance between community ritual and forensic investigation at the time that, the evening his body was discovered in a ditch, a wake was held in Moore's home in Reamore, at which visitors roamed freely through his house. The following day detectives from Dublin arrived to fingerprint the house. "The whole place could have been found guilty," one local joked.Actually, there was just one suspect. Moore had been due to appear at Tralee Circuit Court a month later after a boundary dispute with his neighbour, Dan Foley. Moore had already told the Garda that Foley had begun to follow him home at night. Photographers camped outside Foley's home in the expectation of seeing him led away in handcuffs. He never was.With insufficient evidence against Foley the case had gone cold the following year when the bishop of Kerry, Dr Denis Moynihan, made an extraordinary plea for information. For leverage he decreed that crimes connected to land disputes were now "reserved sins" in the parishes of Ballymacelliot and Tralee, meaning that only he and his deputy could absolve them. This was a sort of good cop-God cop routine: come forward or risk damnation. It was, as one person described it in Gus Smith and Des Hickey's book, John B: The Real Keane, a frightening development. "It was the kind of extreme action that struck fear into the people of these parishes." And still nothing.Were there any justice in the world John B Keane would never have written The Field, a play about a world without any justice. (A 50th-anniversary production is playing at the Gaiety in Dublin.) The events inspired Keane to write the drama of Bull McCabe, a fearsome tenant farmer whose plans to fix an auction for the field he has long farmed are scuppered by an outside bidder, and whose fatal retaliation holds consequences for his village, his besieged conscience and the frustrated law of God and man.Can the dramatisation of unsolved crimes and miscarriages of justice bring closure? Keane had his own qualms of conscience when writing the play. It was produced, finally, seven years after the events that inspired it, and a few years after Foley himself had died an isolated and shunned man, still protesting his innocence. (His nephew John Foley has continued to defend him and is quoted in a new programme note by Billy Keane, John B's son.) There is an agony in such immortality; to never be found guilty, to never be found innocent, to be eternally on trial.Something strangely similar happened with a new play by Peter Gowen that recently concluded a national tour. The Chronicles of Oggle, a solo performance, is a history of dispossession and abuse in a priest-ridden Ireland whose details are depressingly familiar. So much so, in fact, that Gowen's play reads like a formula.His protagonist, Pakie, moves quickly from his home to the beatings and molestations of a Christian Brothers industrial school and then into an adulthood of resistance and divided communities. But it is also based on a true story, that of a childhood friend who died by suicide in his late 30s after a life scarred by sexual abuse.The "Oggle" of the title is a not-so-veiled reference to Gowen's native Youghal, where the play premiered in 2013. Shortly before it was due to return to the town for the tour, though, its dates were cancelled by the local promoters, who cited complaints from "unnamed sources".That may sound like censorship or a publicity boon – the story became part of the production's marketing material – but either way it lends heft to Pakie's distinction between a singular observer and a timid community: "Two eyes sees all. Ten thousand eyes sees nothing." All of this made it fascinating to read, in these pages, about the musician Cormac Breatnach's intention to make a stage performance based on the wrongful conviction of his brother, Osgur, for the 1976 Sallins train robbery. My colleague Peter Murtagh's article described it as "something of an exorcism" for Breatnach, whose formative years were affected by the miscarriage of justice.Theatre deals with conflict, with trauma and, ideally, with catharsis: you plunge into the depths in order to resurface, with luck, feeling shaken but cleansed. But theatre is ill equipped to bring much of anything to a conclusion. When Donal O'Kelly's play Ailliliú Fionnuala imagined the trial of an oil executive behind the Shell Corrib gas project in Rossport it seemed like wishful thinking for protesters, a reminder that any real-life reckoning was just a pipe dream. The laws of theatre are curious things, endlessly argued.To imagine something may be the first step to bringing it into being, but to witness a fantasy of justice in an unaccountable world seems like simple, perhaps dangerous, placation. It's hard to stage a conflict resolution. An audience in Youghal, for whatever reason, can always look away. After more than half a century a murder suspect is still in the dock. Understand the People, the history, the way of life at the time. this movie shows some of the way we had to life, whether right or wrong . . as an proud Irish person (sometimes we fu** up too) i am not proud of some of our past ' governments,the Catholic church,starvation, but it is our pain, it makes us who we are, Brave movie to make in Ireland .

Having just directed "My Left Foot", Jim Sheridan directed "The Field", an adaptation of John B. Keane's 1965 play about a tough farmer trying to hold on to the land that he rents in 1930s Ireland. Richard Harris's Bull McCabe is a real bull in every sense; he's almost not the sort of person who should even have a family. When an American businessman (Tom Berenger) tries to buy the land, Bull takes drastic measures. Much of the story revolves around what we find out about what happened in Bull's family.At times, "The Field" is an unpleasant movie to watch. Of course, that shows what a good movie it is. We see the hardships faced by the Irish (while hearing stories of the Potato Famine) and also get to see some great shots of the Emerald Isle's countryside. This is one movie that I highly recommend.Also starring Sean Bean (Boromir in the "Lord of the Rings" trilogy), John Hurt, Brenda Fricker (Mrs. Brown in "My Left Foot"), Frances Tomelty (Sting's first wife), and brief appearances by Brendan Gleeson and Malachy McCourt (the brother of "Angela's Ashes" author Frank McCourt).

Being an avid follower of the Oscars ever since the 1984 ceremony has sometimes served to alert me about small movies which had nevertheless obtained at least one major accolade; this powerful Irish drama was just such a case and, appropriately enough, it has taken me all of 18 years to finally watch it! Richard Harris deservedly received his second personal Academy Award nomination (and the film's sole Oscar nod) for his riveting portrayal of an old farmer who is not about to let a visiting Irish-American (Tom Berenger) take away the titular plot of land which he has slaved for years over to breathe new life into. The colorful cast of characters is rounded up by John Hurt (as the mischievous village idiot), Brenda Fricker (as Harris' wife – whom he has not spoken to for 18 years, since the accidental death of his son, despite still living under the same roof with her), Sean Bean (as Harris' immature other offspring) and Jenny Conroy (as the sultry village hussy whom Bean eventually takes up with over Harris' objections). The film – which opens with the startling donkey disposal incident and closes with the mass suicide of a herd of cows that has tragic consequences – is often beautiful to look and has a fine Elmer Bernstein score into the bargain but, truthfully, its real trump card remains, as I mentioned above, Harris' tour-de-force central performance.

"The Field": Starring 1990 Oscar Nominee for Best Actor Richard Harris, Sean Bean, John Hurt, Brenda Fricker, Frances Tomelty, and Tom Berenger. This is the stuff of the Epics. Think novels with the Hugeness of Vision by Thomas Hardy, John Steinbeck, or Herman Melville; the Tales of the Greeks or Shakespeare; and the operas of Wagner. HUGE visions. All of this is hidden in a little story about an Irishman who rents a 3 acre plot of land? It only stays hidden for so long. Richard Harris is fantastic as an aging man who feels disconnected to all but "his" beautiful, green, beloved (leased) plot of land, which was worked by his father before him and his father before him. Alas, his son (Sean Bean) seems hesitant to carry it on. If that isn't bad enough for a man who sees nothing as more important than tradition and love for the land, along comes an American (Tom Berenger) with a whole new idea for this property, and soon makes the legal owner an offer of purchase. The little story becomes bigger – then Bigger – and BIGGER – all the way to HUGE. It has a straight-ahead, linear movement that not only seems to imply warnings, but unstoppable Karma. Like all good Epics, it is full of lessons – about vice, virtue, evil, wisdom, warnings, tragedy, potential redemption, and reminders about what is good & bad, right & wrong, fair & unfair. You'll also love the landscapes.